One night, ten years ago, I was racing across Portland, Oregon, hoping to see the Foghorn Stringband, an old-time group that had a weekly residence at a pub called Moon and Sixpence. I wasn’t expecting a concert, per se. It Read More …
“I don’t want to make somebody else,” Toni Morrison’s character Sula declares, when urged to get married and have kids, “I want to make myself.” Morrison herself might have understood this to be a false dichotomy—she was a single mother Read More …
Four years ago, the filmmaker and television producer Glenn Silber and his wife, Claudia Vianello—also a film producer—moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. For the previous thirty-five years, Silber and Vianello had been living in, first, Los Angeles, and then Read More …
Just before midnight on Saturday, November 3rd, the pop auteur Ariana Grande unexpectedly released a new single, the twinkling “thank u, next.” Unannounced song drops are less surprising than inevitable in pop music these days, and not all of them Read More …
Last year’s Netflix documentary “Gaga: Five Foot Two,” which followed Lady Gaga, née Stefani Germanotta, as she recorded her 2016 album, “Joanne,” and prepared for the Super Bowl halftime performance of the following year, was presented as an exercise in Read More …
When my wife was a kid, in the early nineteen-sixties, she and her siblings listened, over and over, to records by Jim Copp. I knew nothing about him until thirty years later, when her brother copied a few of the Read More …
The sexual-assault allegations against the movie producer Harvey Weinstein were first reported in October, 2017, which means that we have now spent eleven months listening to the victims of such violence, most of them women. This is a deeply unusual Read More …
There is something disturbing about a blank movie marquee. It’s like a face without a mouth. I don’t mean the brief transitory blankness when the lettering for one movie is taken down at the end of its run to be Read More …
In April, Alek Minassian, a twenty-five-year-old from Toronto, wrote a Facebook post—“The Incel Rebellion has already begun!”—and then drove his car into a crowd of pedestrians. For many people, this news raised two questions: Is there no depth to which Read More …
I hesitate to grab the word “reality” when probing at “Maniac” (Netflix). The series ventures through the altered consciousnesses of two participants in a psychiatric-drug trial, one of whom, Owen (Jonah Hill), has a history of schizophrenic delusions. Momentary hallucinations Read More …